Alteon WebSystems

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Alteon WebSystems Inc. NASDAQ: ATON, formerly known as Alteon Networks, "The Server Switching Company", was an Internet infrastructure company based in San Jose, California. Alteon was founded in 1996 by Mark Bryers, John Hayes, Ted Schroeder and Wayne Hathaway. Alteon was acquired by Nortel Networks on October 4, 2000. (Original acquisition announcment on July 28, 2000.)

Alteon introduced innovative products such as the ACEswitch 180, which was the first network switch to deliver seamless Ethernet with selectable speed, 10/100 or 1000 Mbit/s, on every port. Their ACEdirector Layer 4-7 switch was designed as an integrated services front-end and server load balancer. They also introduced Jumbo Frames (up to 9,000 bytes) with their ACEnic adapters, and supported by their switches.

In addition to their Server Switches, Alteon produced the first Gigabit Ethernet network interface card (NIC) in 1997. Alteon's third generation Gigabit Ethernet NIC became the basis for Broadcom's family of gigabit NICs and has shipped over 60 million cores.

[edit] Trivia

• "It sucks." Rejected Print ad, 1999. "Did You Think You Could Ever Be This Happy Again?"